This blog is devoted to a variety of topics including politics, current events, legal issues, and we even take the time to have some occasional fun. After all, blogging is about having a little fun, right?

Friday, January 29, 2010

UN holding peace talks with the Taliban?

If you can believe it ...Let's remember that the UN is hardly an organization to be trusted. I haven't trusted them, ever, and their official presence is always seen as a detriment. They're a world bureaucracy, and nothing more. They should be shunned, thrown out of NY, and disbanded. For a long time, the UN has proven that it is, literally, a revised League of Nations. The difference between the UN and the League of Nations is that the UN still hasn't learned that it's an irrelevant organization that only socialists believe in, and the rest of the world looks at as a interfering body with no relevance whatsoever. But, despite that, the UN has decided that it can help out in Afghanistan by brokering a peace deal between the West and Taliban forces:Taliban commanders held secret exploratory talks with a United Nations\ special envoy this month to discuss peace terms, it emerged tonight.Regional commanders on the Taliban's leadership council, the Quetta Shura, sought a meeting with the UN special representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, and it took place in Dubai on 8 January. "They requested a meeting to talk about talks. They want protection, to be able to come out in public. They don't want to vanish into places like Bagram," the Reuters news agency quoted a UN official as saying, referring to the Bagram detention centre at a US military base outside Kabul.The Dubai meeting was confirmed to the Guardian by officials with knowledge of the encounter, but they said they could provide no further details.

It was the first such meeting between the UN and senior members of the Taliban. The fact that it took place suggests that peace talks have revived since exploratory contacts between emissaries of the Kabul government and the Taliban in Saudi Arabia last year broke down.

It also suggests that some Taliban members might be prepared for the first time to put faith in an international organisation to broker a deal to end the nine-year war.

News of the Dubai meeting surfaced at the end of a day-long conference in London intended to map out a transition over five years from a Nato-led military campaign to Afghan-led effort involving more political, social and economic measures to end the fighting.

As part of the transition, Afghan forces are due to take lead responsibility for security in a handful of provinces by the end of this year, assume the lead in the most violent regions within three years, and take overall responsibility for security across the country in five years. If successful, the transition would pave the way for the withdrawal of foreign forces.

Hello? You can't negotiate peace with a group that wants the West destroyed and burned to the ground. This is a sad fact that peaceniks seemed to have missed. The Taliban and al Qaeda aren't interested in peace. They're in the middle of a jihad to take down the West for some perceived wrongs that we've already corrected. The US and the West are no longer in Saudi Arabia, which was the prime focus of bin Laden's reason for jihad against the West. We are in Afghanistan because it was the Taliban and al Qaeda that concocted and launched an attack on America from that country. We want peace with the Taliban when they ultimately surrender. (We can argue tactics and strategy at a later date. That IS NOT the focus of this piece.) The UN thinks they can broker a peace deal, and they neglect to see that the peace deals brokered by the Pakistanis with militants in Pakistan (Taliban and al Qaeda) haven't been met yet. To the Taliban, a "peace deal" is no different from a peace deal worked out by the Israelis and their aggressors -- it's ink on a page until the aggressor rearms itself to attack again. That's all this is. It's a stalling tactics by the Taliban, and one would think the UN knows better than to negotiate with a rabid pit-bull. Then again, I've never given the UN credit for having intelligence.Publius II